Baptism of fire: my first criminal trial

It was a blisteringly hot afternoon at the tail end of my pupillage in ’00. I was staring into space and imagining my glorious debut in court – when the phone rang.On the other end was a clerk from a small local solicitors’ firm, who asked, with alarming nonchalance, whether I could defend a robbery trial at Sha Tin Magistrates’ Court the following week.I said yes immediately – with a brief hesitation revealing that it would be my first criminal trial in the hope that honesty would not cost me the case.Inside, I panicked. Robbery is a serious offence, and my imagination ran wild. A client straight out of the ’95 classic Heat – Robert De Niro, perhaps Val Kilmer – brooding, dangerous, morally ambiguous. I mentally prepared myself for a gritty battle of wits – possibly a devastating cross-examination against a hardened detective.Reality, of course, had other plans.My “Jesse James” was a teenage girl who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Her alleged role in this “grand heist” was standing around her juvenile friends at a neighbourhood video arcade while they pressured a younger boy into handing over his lunch money so they could keep playing Street Fighter.